When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smell sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence; when the rose smelt sweet you did not say, 'My father is a rude, barbaric symbol enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truth that flowers smell.' No, you believed your father because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you the truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. _'Orthodoxy.'_ OCTOBER 9th There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism. _'G. F. Watts.'_ OCTOBER 10th Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love. _'Daily News.'_ OCTOBER 11th Commonness means the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to the philosopher and the fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and developed. In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens. And everybody does not mean uneducated crowds, everybody means everybody: everybody means Mrs. Meynell. _'Charles Dickens.'_ OCTOBER 12th Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them. _'Charles Dickens.'_ OCTOBER 13th In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head. _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_ OCTOBER 14th _BATTLE OF HASTINGS_ Gored on the Norman gonfalon The Golden Dragon died, We shall not wake with ballad strings The good time of the smaller things, We shall not see the holy kings Ride down the Severn side. _'Ballad of Alfred.'_ OCTOBER 15th